


Hell out of Town

by kototyph



Series: put your money where your mouth is 'verse [4]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Dean Is Not Interested in Your 3AM Ghost Stories, Ficlet, Halloween, M/M, Nightmares, Timestamp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-03 21:34:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21186335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kototyph/pseuds/kototyph
Summary: “Is everything alright?” The question is murmured against Dean’s neck, Castiel’s voice low and hoarse from sleep.“Yeah,” Dean mutters, a little embarrassed. “Just, you know. Nightmare.”





	Hell out of Town

It’s Dean’s own shuddering breath that wakes him, the rough inhale before a shout that never happens. It’s harsh enough to run the edge of choking, and he’s suddenly, rigidly awake, staring wide-eyed into familiar darkness.

It takes a second for cognition to catch up:  _ bed  _ filters in first, followed by  _ dark  _ and  _ cold as shit _ and  _ I have work tomorrow, damn it.  _ The irritation doesn’t do much to quench the lingering adrenaline, the clenched muscles and a heartbeat hard enough to chew like a piece of candy. He can’t take his eyes off the open void of the closet across the room. 

While fear holds him frozen, there’s an indistinct, sleepy noise from the other side of the bed. A body moves under the sheets, dragging them further away from Dean’s exposed arms and chest. 

“... Dean?”

He doesn’t answer immediately; someone around here should be getting sleep if they can. But the mattress is already shifting, dipping, and a solid warmth rolls in to settle against his back. 

“Is everything alright?” The question is murmured against Dean’s neck, Castiel’s voice low and hoarse from sleep.

“Yeah,” Dean mutters, a little embarrassed. He tries shutting his eyes, but that only makes it worse. “Just, you know. Nightmare.”

Castiel makes a sympathetic noise in the back of his throat, and Dean feels him angle his face to better fit the curve of Dean’s shoulder under his shirt. “What about?”

The details are already dissolving into whatever weird, inaccessible place the subconscious pulls them from, and he honestly has no idea what he was dreaming. Not that he’d want to hold onto it if he could. “Just… running? Something chasing me. That kind of thing.”

“Sorry,” Castiel offers.

“Not your fault.” There are tentative fingers sliding over his ribs, and Dean slowly reaches for them, tugs them up, until Castiel’s arm is snug under his and their hands are tucked against his chest. Castiel sighs, hot and a little ticklish on his neck, and the bands start to unlock from the rest of Dean’s muscles.

“What about you?” he says. As he relaxes enough to be held, Castiel obligingly pulls him closer, a knee nudging up behind his. 

“Mm?”

“You ever have nightmares here? Living alone, big old house.” 

“Ah. No. Despite my sister’s best efforts,” Castiel says with a rueful note.

“Really? What about when you were a kid?”

“Then, certainly,” Castiel says, thumb stroking along Dean’s knuckles. “We were all afraid of Aunt Amara.”

Dean smiles in the dark. “Yeah? Was she really witchy?”

“Very. She routinely threatened to turn us all into mice and set the cats on us if we didn’t behave.”

“Oh, classic,” Dean says. His lids are getting heavy, and he lets them slide closed.

“Mmhm. Everyone said she’d murdered her husbands, so we were convinced she could do it.”

Dean’s eyes blink open again. “... murdered?”

Castiel yawns. “Mmhm. My brothers used to tell Anna and I they were buried in the root cellar under the house.”

“Hold up. People, including her own family, thought she’d killed her husbands.”

“Well, yes. That’s what they told us.”

“And no one, I don’t know, called the cops?” Dean says, half-turning towards him. 

Castiel moves back a little to meet Dean’s incredulous stare. “Someone did after the second died, I think. They never found anything.”

“After the— are you serious?” Dean wiggles until they’re facing each other, Castiel’s arm sliding off him. “Cas. You’re not making this up?”

“No?” Castiel says more tentatively. “I remember the last one, a little. He stopped coming to things, and she told us he moved away suddenly. It seemed as good an explanation to me as any at the time.”

“Your aunt might have been a  _ serial killer _ and that was the best explanation? No one did anything?”

“We did stop visiting,” Castiel mumbles. “I was six, I didn’t know it was that odd. Though that was after we found the... uh.”

Dean prods him in the stomach when he pauses. “You really can’t just stop there, man.”

“This probably isn’t helping you get back to sleep,” says Dean’s incredibly astute and emotionally intelligent spouse.

“No!” Dean says, jabbing him harder. “No, it sure as hell is not.  _ What did you find?” _

“Perhaps we should discuss this over breakfast,” Castiel tries, which is when Dean shoves him over and sits on him. He makes a very satisfying  _ Oof! _ noise as Dean’s weight settles on his stomach. “Dean—!”

“I am willing to hit you with this as many times as it takes,” Dean says, holding a pillow above his head. “Tell the damn story, Cas.”

“It’s not—” Castiel tries to sit up and Dean menaces him with down alternative; he drops to his elbows instead, looking up at him with a thwarted scowl. “It’s nothing, really. When we were very young, Gabriel and Lucas found some bones buried behind the stables. Our parents said they were from slaughtered pigs, from when the stables had barns and pens attached, but it was still quite a macabre thing for a child to see.” 

“Wha— it’d be fucking ‘macabre’ for anyone to see! What did you do with them?”

“Do with what?”

“The  _ bones,  _ Cas, what happened to the bones?”

Castiel eyes the pillow suspended above him. “We put them back? They were just animal bones.”

“So they’re still here?” Dean waves at the windows, the thick copses of trees just starting to lose their leaves and the fat yellow moon bobbing along above the ocean. “You’re telling me there could be unmarked graves somewhere out there?”

“Well, considering the age of the house,” Castiel starts, and gets a pillow to the face. Dean plants a hand in the middle and grinds it in for good measure.

“Oh my God,” he mutters, rolling to the side while Castiel flails. He leans down to grab the duvet and drags it up around his ears, cocooning himself. “I can’t believe this place sometimes. Friggin’ murder mysteries, great. Awesome.”

“They were just animal bones,” Castiel says grumpily, hugging the pillow to his stomach. “Probably.”

“See, the fact that you feel the need to say that—”

_ “Definitely,”  _ Castiel amends. “I am entirely certain that they were animal bones and therefore of no consequence to us then or now.”

Dean pulls the duvet down just far enough for Castiel to see his mouth. “Buried corpses are in general a bad thing to have around,” he enunciates. 

“I think that’s a bit dramatic,” Castiel answers, and Dean flaps the comforter at him.

“Excuse me? Dramatic? Who decided to tell me we’re living in a horror movie opener  _ right after I woke up from a nightmare?” _

Castiel squints. “Horror movie opener? What does that mean?” 

“It means your ex-uncles are going to haunt our asses until one of us ax-murders the other!”

“If there were any ghosts here, I’d have seen them well before now,” Castiel says with certainty, and Dean lets out a tortured groan and pulls the mess of sheets over his head. “Dean?”

“It’s fine, I didn’t actually want more sleep,” Dean grumbles, curling up tight. “Nope. One hundred percent well rested and refreshed over here.” 

“Dean. The house isn’t haunted.”

“That’s what they all say.”

Castiel sighs, and there’s a light pressure on the side of Dean’s head for a moment. “... I can get you a glass of water, if you like.”

The master bath is weeks away from full functionality, pipes in various states of replacement and tile in stacks on the floor. What’s he’s really offering is to make the long, cold walk to the kitchen and back, and that might be enough contrition to speak to him again.

Dean uncovers the smallest amount of face possible. “Bring the leftover candy, too,” he says.

Castiel says “No,” but still bends down and kisses the bit that’s exposed. Mostly cheek, a little nose. Dean uncovers a bit more in the hopes of getting some lip action, but Castiel is already shifting away.

“C’mon, just a Reese’s?” Dean says as the mattress dips and rises again.

“We’ll see what’s left,” Castiel says, which probably means extra no with no on top, and shuffles off. 

The moment Castiel steps beyond the moonlight laid in blocks across the sheets, he’s mostly invisible. Dean listens instead to the scuff of his feet on the wood floor, the wide inhale of another yawn, the creak of the door opening and closing. 

Oh, he did not think this through.

“Cas?” he says, pulling the sheets down, but it’s too late— he hears the  _ thump-thump-thump  _ of footsteps in the stairwell, fading into silence. “Fuck.” _ _

Dean’s not twelve and the dark isn’t scary anymore, but it was more not-scary with another body in bed with him. Even if that body wanted to tell him all about his aunt-in-law the murderer at three in the fucking morning. He flops over to stare at the ceiling and takes a deep, slow breath.

Somewhere in the dark, there’s the  _ click  _ of a latch coming unstuck. 

Dean slowly turns his head towards the noise. Cas must not have pulled the door all the way closed behind him— old doors have their quirks, and that door more than most. In the gloom, it still  _ looks _ closed.

As he watches, something pushes on the wood from the outside. The sound of impact is soft enough Dean could mistake it for the wind, or a noise downstairs, if it wasn’t for the accompanying faint shriek of the hinges. A widening crack appears, leading to the pure black of the landing outside. The doorway is empty.

Dean is quieter than he means to be when he says, “Cas?”

Nothing moves.

“Not funny,” he says, his heart starting to crawl up his throat again. “Cas, c’mon. I…”

The door eases inwards with an almost slithering sound, like things invisible brushing against the wood. Dean, too tense to blink, stares into the unrelieved darkness of the landing and the rest of his words die in his mouth. 

Nabokov jumps on the bed less than six inches from his face and Dean yells “ _ Shit!”  _ so loudly she leaps straight towards the ceiling, the way only cats do. “Holy shit! Holy—”

_ “Dean?” _

The cat flees with a wild scramble of claws on hardwood and Dean sits straight up, gasping for air. “Holy Mother of God, Jesus, fucking  _ Christ on crutches,  _ you fucking asshole cat—”

_ “Dean, are you alright?” _

“No!” Dean shouts at his husband and their damn house and the  _ fucking cat,  _ “I’m really, really not! Get back up here right now, or I swear to God I’m sleeping in the car!”

Castiel thinks it’s funny as hell; Dean can tell by the way his eyes widen as he listens to Dean describe the door creaking open and the cat practically landing on him. But when he says, “That does sound very frightening,” it’s gentle, and he has a full thermos of water that he passes over when Dean says “Shut up,” and makes irritable grabbing motions. As he drinks in sulky silence, Castiel stands up and goes to the doors around the room, shutting them in succession: closet, ensuite, linen closet, landing. 

At the last, he pauses to look at the floor just outside, and murmurs, “Hello.” He stoops and scoops up something lying on the ground, and brings it back to the bed.

“What’s that?” Dean asks suspiciously.

“Rosie, I think?” Castiel answers, and deposits the kitten on Dean’s folded legs. “Franklin said all cats are grey in the dark— it’s true.”

Probably-Rosie does a long, toe-spreading stretch and yawns toothily at them. Dean sets the thermos on the bedside table and rubs a knuckle along her jaw; she leans into it hard, her tiny claws gripping his hand to keep it there.

“Stay like that,” Castiel orders, and he shakes out the sheets and duvet, and finds the extra quilts where they’d kicked them off onto the floor. He climbs onto the mattress and kneewalks towards Dean with the layers draped over his shoulders in a thick ugly cape, and when he reaches the middle he engulfs both Dean and the kitten, toppling them back against the pillows and the headboard.

“Better?” he asks Dean, tucking the edge of the sheets under his shoulder. 

The kitten squirms out from between them and sits on the pillows. “Yeah,” Dean says, smiling a little. Castiel’s skin is cold where it touches Dean’s, and instead of rolling away to his side of the bed, he folds himself around Dean like another layer of bedding. Chilly fingers tuck themselves under Dean’s side, and Dean wraps his arm around his waist, pulling him in tight.

They don’t speak for a long time; the kitten explores the headboard, the window above it. It walks across Castiel’s back and Dean’s side, and curls up close enough to Dean’s ear to hear the rattling purr. The bed warms up and it’s bliss.

Dean has almost fallen asleep again when he remembers something.

“Cas?”

“Hm?”

“I didn’t know we had stables. Where are they?”

“Oh. We don’t, actually— Aunt Amara had them torn down a bit after we found the bones.”

Dean’s eyes drag open.  _ “... Cas.” _

**Author's Note:**

> Cat moms/dads/parents-- am I right or SUPER RIGHT


End file.
